A Star Candidate’s Support for Secession Undercuts Quebec’s Governing Party

BUCKINGHAM, Quebec — With his media holdings and celebrity, Pierre Karl Péladeau is a combination of Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi, so his decision to run as a candidate in Quebec’s legislative elections has drastically altered the campaign. But the commotion he has caused was not what his party, the Parti Québécois, had hoped for when it introduced Mr. Péladeau as its star candidate last month.

During the 18 months it has held power, the Parti Québécois routinely dismissed suggestions that it wanted to move swiftly to hold a third referendum on whether the mostly French-speaking province of Quebec should leave Canada. The party has tried to play down the option of separation, mindful that a majority of Quebec’s voters oppose independence, according to numerous polls going back several years.

But with one fiery declaration, Mr. Péladeau appears to have all but demolished his party’s hopes for victory in Monday’s snap election.

“Today, we have the tools to take control of our own destiny,” he told a crowd last month in his first speech in the Montreal suburb he is campaigning to represent. “My devotion to the Parti Québécois is a devotion based on my most intimate values — that is to say: making Quebec a country.” His raised fist provided an exclamation mark.

The impact was immediate. In a blog post, Michel Pepin, a political analyst with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s French service, compared Mr. Péladeau’s entry into politics to “a fragmentation bomb” that would leave none of the four provincial political parties untouched, in ways both good and bad.

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Pierre Karl Péladeau, left, with Pauline Marois, right, leader of Parti Québécois, at a campaign stop in Quebec City on Sunday.CreditMathieu Belanger/Reuters

The once-comfortable lead held by the Parti Québécois in the early part of the campaign has evaporated, and all major polls now suggest that it is unlikely to return as the province’s governing party.

For the Parti Québécois, the business success of Mr. Péladeau — whose Quebecor Media empire includes holdings in broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, book publishing, cable television and a cellphone service — offered it a candidate with the potential to shake off the party’s image as a movement of intellectuals and artists. But by instantly turning the elections into a debate about separation he appears to have all but reversed his party’s prospects for victory over its main rival, the Liberal Party, which supports Canadian unity.

“The Liberals don’t need to have a big program,” said Mireille Lalancette a professor of political communications at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. “Because the P.Q. is damaging itself now.”

Last week when Philippe Couillard, a neurosurgeon who leads the Liberal Party, spoke at a rally here in Buckingham, a town about 100 miles west of Montreal, Mr. Péladeau’s name was not mentioned. But Mr. Couillard repeatedly said a vote for the Parti Québécois was a vote for separation.

“There is one clear choice ahead of us: the P.Q. wants to have a referendum,” he told the crowd of supporters. “They say they won’t do it. Nobody believes them.”

The Liberal Party has its own problems. Corruption accusations involving previous Liberal governments are now the subject of a public inquiry, and continuing revelations about links among the party, organized crime and the construction industry might have doomed it in most elections. But Mr. Péladeau’s remarks seem to have revived its hopes.

Despite Mr. Péladeau’s disastrous debut, few anticipate that he will abandon politics after Monday or be cast aside by the Parti Québécois. Pierre Martin, a professor of political science at the Université de Montréal, said it was unlikely that anyone could tell Mr. Péladeau what to do.

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Philippe Couillard, the Liberal Party leader, has said voting for Parti Québécois is equivalent to voting for separatists.CreditJacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

The Parti Québécois declined a request for an interview with Mr. Péladeau, saying that he was not speaking to the international media until after the elections.

In many respects the pairing of the Parti Québécois and Mr. Péladeau, popularly known as P.K.P., is a strange one. In heavily unionized Quebec, the separatist cause and the Parti Québécois have both relied significantly on support from labor unions. But Mr. Péladeau, 52, is well-known as an anti-union employer who has locked out workers at various companies 14 times. A 2011 lockout at Journal de Montréal, the tabloid founded by Mr. Péladeau’s father, who was also named Pierre, dragged on for 764 days.

After Mr. Péladeau succeeded his father, who died in 1997, he turned Quebecor into a multimedia machine. Although he has now dropped all of his titles at Quebecor, he still controls just under 72 percent of its voting shares, a situation that Mr. Couillard and others view as an inherent conflict of interest.

Until last month, Mr. Péladeau’s position on independence for Quebec was not entirely clear. Through his Sun Media subsidiary, Mr. Péladeau also owns a chain of English-language tabloid newspapers outside of Quebec and a right-of-center cable news channel, Sun News. They all feature commentators who regularly mock the idea of Quebec’s independence or its status as a “distinct society,” often in ways that have offended even Quebecers who do not want to leave Canada.

Quebec’s independence movement may not be the only political cause that Mr. Péladeau has upset. Ms. Lalancette, the political communications professor, said that Pauline Marois, Quebec’s premier and the leader of the Parti Québécois, clearly hoped to build her campaign around her proposal to ban the wearing of obvious religious symbols like hijabs, turbans, skull caps and large crucifixes. Despite Ms. Marois’s efforts to the contrary, debate over that measure during the campaign has been largely crowded out by talk about separation.

But Ms. Lalancette said that the controversy generated by Mr. Péladeau did have one positive impact. Last week, an advance poll for students was set up outside of her office.

“I was surprised, in a good way, by the many, many students who came to vote,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Star Candidate’s Support for Secession Undercuts Quebec’s Governing Party. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe